Introducing Ted Nannicelli as the New Editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind

Ted Nannicelli, Film and Television Studies, University of Queensland

The first thing I would like to do in my capacity as the new editor of Projections is to warmly thank the outgoing editor, Stephen Prince, for his outstanding stewardship of the journal over the past six years. Already a success when Stephen took over in 2012, Projections has only improved since then. It has been a great pleasure for me to work with Stephen as one of the associate editors over the past few years, and I am delighted that Stephen will remain involved with the journal in some capacity, since he has recently been elected the new president of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI).

This is an opportune moment to note a few other recent changes. First, Projections is no longer associated with the Forum for Movies and Mind. As a result of this change, we have instituted a new editorial board, although some previous members will be continuing their service. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all those associated with the Forum for Movies and Mind-in particular, Bruce Sklarew and others who conceived of and established Projections as an academic journal. I am also especially grateful to the outgoing members of the editorial board, whose service has established Projections as an academically rigorous, theoretically pluralistic journal.

Although Projections‘s only formal association now is with the SCSMI, our continued success is dependent upon our ability to maintain and expand a wide and diverse readership that significantly exceeds the SCSMI’s membership. I especially hope that those of you who began subscribing to Projections in conjunction with its affiliation with the Forum for Movies and Mind will continue to support us.

In addition, the two new associate editors, Tim Smith and Aaron Taylor, and I have our sights set on further expanding Projections‘s interdisciplinary scope and its readership. We have updated our statement of aims and scope accordingly, and we invite you to spread the word to others. We would be grateful if, even if you are already a regular individual subscriber, you could take a moment to complete the library recommendation form on our website so that Projections can also be available to students and colleagues at your institution.

In keeping with our commitment to interdisciplinary exchange, we are also introducing several new submission formats that are outlined in the “guidelines for submission” section on our website. Our aim is twofold: to make the minimal criteria for publication in Projections more explicit and to generate greater dialogue between researchers working in different scholarly traditions. We also hope that the new format options broaden the appeal of Projections as a destination for high-quality research among a broader and more diverse group of scholars.

I think that the collection of articles in the current issue* of Projections is indicative of the extent to which we have already successfully begun to publish excellent research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives-and it is also suggestive our future direction: it includes contributions by scholars based in English and comparative literature, film and media studies, psychology, and philosophy.

This issue begins with two articles that revisit Russian classical film theory in light of recent developments in neuroscience and psychology. First, Maria Belodubrovskaya explores the affinities between Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of “attractions” and the preconscious, automatic responses identified by contemporary neuroscience. Next, Sermin Ildirar and Louise Ewing present the results of their attempt to replicate the results of Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing experiments.

The following three articles investigate conceptual issues relating to film interpretation broadly construed to include narrative comprehension. Peter Alward offers a close analysis of Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987) in support of his argument for what philosophers of art call “the value-maximizing” account of art interpretation, which suggests that our higher-order interpretations ought to be partly guided by considerations of which interpretation(s) would make the artwork most artistically valuable. In contrast, Hannah Wojciehowski’s analysis of Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) focuses on a lower-order interpretive matter-namely, the viewer’s process of piecing together the narrative of a puzzle film. One implication of Wojciehowski’s article-that the filmmakers’ intentional jumbling of narrative pieces in a particular fashion affords them control over the viewer’s ability to arrive at a correct understanding of the story at the appropriate time-intriguingly chimes with Belodubrovskaya’s discussion of Eisenstein’s “cine-fist” in relation to contemporary action cinema. Wojciehowski’s analysis of Arrival also segues nicely into the concluding article, in which Veerle Ros and Miklós Kiss develop a new account, based on Torben Grodal’s PECMA (perception, emotion, cognition, motor action) flow model, of viewers’ engagement with narratively complex films.

Following Ros and Kiss’s article are several book reviews that we are publishing at once to hand over a clean slate to Aaron Taylor, our new associate editor in charge of book reviews. As with the articles, I am impressed by the diversity of perspectives represented in the books reviewed here, and I hope you will be, too.